


It's My Party

by Kahvi



Category: Red Dwarf
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-08-27
Updated: 2006-08-27
Packaged: 2017-10-12 09:50:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,232
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/123584
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kahvi/pseuds/Kahvi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rimmer makes a very important announcement, and absolutely no one cares.</p>
            </blockquote>





	It's My Party

**Author's Note:**

> This is the first Red Dwarf story I ever wrote, although I never finished it. Well, I have now, obviously, but it needed a lot of tweaking. So thanks muchly to the lovely [](http://roadstergal.livejournal.com/profile)[**roadstergal**](http://roadstergal.livejournal.com/) for the beta. Written as part of the [](http://community.livejournal.com/fanfic100/profile)[**fanfic100**](http://community.livejournal.com/fanfic100) challenge - [my table is here](http://kahvi.livejournal.com/513913.html).

Arnold Judas Rimmer pulled nervously on his jacket as he entered Starbug's mid-section. It was now or never, and he was determined to do it right. Making sure that everyone was within earshot, he coughed, trying to make the forced throat-clearing sound as commanding as possible.

"Right!" he said, in what he hoped was an appropriate tone of voice. "Everyone, I have an announcement to make."

There was no reaction. The Cat kept on hemming his trousers, Lister was still absorbed in what looked like the technical manual for an AR game, and Kryten was still busily sorting the week's laundry, having finally finished alphabetizing their assortment of canned goods. "Right." Clearly, this was the best he was going to get. He took a deep breath.

"I, Arnold J. Rimmer, am a homosexual."

No reaction. Lister turned the manual upside-down, peering at something.

"I'm gay."

"We know," the Cat said, not looking up.

"Yeah, good on ye," Lister added, absentmindedly.

"Oh Sir," Kryten said in dismay, "I only wish you'd told me sooner. There's just no possible way I could get a cake ready for tonight."

"A cake?" Rimmer frowned. He vaguely felt that this was not how it was supposed to go.

"Yeah, for yer coming out party," Lister agreed.

"Party?"

"I suppose I could manage some sort of pastry-arrangement," Kryten mused, wringing the pair of Lister's boxer shorts he was holding. They were the blue ones with the hole near the right buttock, Rimmer noted, for no particular reason. You couldn't help noticing, after all. The man used to spend an extraordinary amount of time in his boxers, and that was hardly Rimmer's fault, was it? Oh god, was there any way in which it _could_ be his fault?

"Look," Rimmer said, "I think you're all failing to grasp the enormity of what I'm telling you here. I. Am. Gay! Do you realize what that means?"

"Yeah," said the Cat in between stitches, "it means you like guys."

"No, listen," Rimmer said, frustrated now, "I am GAY. Batting for the other team. A shirt-lifting, fudge-packing, faggotty flaming fag! Surely that should mean something to you? Have some effect on your relationship with me?"

"Rrrrelationship?" the Cat exclaimed, throwing his trousers down in disgust. "Listen buddy, I'm not in any kind of relationship with you. Ugly, socially challenged guys whose idea of haute couture is wearing a novelty lapel-pin on their regulation uniform jacket aren't exactly my type. No offense," he added, with a pointy-toothed smile.

Ignoring him, Rimmer focused his attention on Lister. "You're telling me," he said, leaning towards his bunk-mate, "that you've just found out that the man you shared a room with for years is a smegging bum-troubler, and you don't care?" A little spittle came out of his mouth at the final syllable, and his hand flew to his mouth, self-consciously. Not anymore though, his subconscious leered at him. The moment they got on this sodding crate, Lister had gone off to live on his own. Had he known? How could he possibly have known?

Lister looked up from his manual. "Don't say that, man." He put the flimsy booklet down, and threw his feet up on the table in that disgustingly casual manner that Rimmer just _hated_ , and obviously Lister knew this, or he wouldn't be doing it. Not all flauntingly like that, as though he were the current centerfold in Footwear On Furniture Monthly. "I care plenty. Any excuse for a party is okay by me!"

Kryten wrung his hands, having dropped the boxers, deep in thought. "A fruit salad perhaps," he muttered to himself. "That's always welcome."

"Madness," Rimmer mumbled to himself, turning away. He shook his head. Cat and Lister went about their business again, and Kryten trudged on towards the kitchen. Rimmer sat down in a chair some ways away from the table, his head in his hands. "I don't get it," he said finally.

"Don't get what?"

Rimmer flailed his arms in exasperation. "All..." more flailing "this! This isn't how it's supposed to go. You're supposed to be shocked! Horrified, maybe take a little bit of morbid interest, or is that too much to ask, eh?"

"Rimmer, what are you talking about?" Lister threw down the manual, revealing a rather interesting illustration of one of the models available in the program, clad in very little, blinking innocently from the middle spread. The word 'spread' lingered in Rimmer's mind ominously, like unfinished trigonometry homework.

"Where are the accusations of perversion? Where are the threats to call Special Ward and have me quarantined for disrupting morale? And not once, I repeat, not ONCE, have any of you called me a "pansified sissy." Now why is that? Eh? Answer me that!"

"First of all," Lister began slowly and patiently, as though explaining the more complicated aspects of socio-economics to a small child, "how are we going to call for anyone? There's only the four of us here!"

"Furthermore, Sir," Kryten interjected, returning from the kitchen with an impressive glass bowl, "the Special Ward psychiatric SWAT-team exists only in the AR-game _Special Ward: Lithium Weapon_. Which, I might add, Mr. Lister managed to break last night while rummaging around for _Spandex Space Bimbos VII_."

"So... you're OK with this?" Rimmer surveyed the room, looking for confirmation. There was sporadic nodding. "All of you?" More nodding, and a non-committal shrug from the Cat.

"Why wouldn't we be?" Lister asked, giving him an odd look.

"I... don't know?" Rimmer sank down in his chair. Clearly they were all mad. Mad as several schools full of hatters.

  
It was, given the circumstances, and what Kryten had to work with, a rather good party. The Cat had donated one of his oldest and happily very colorful suits to be made into streamers, which criss-crossed the walls gaily. Quite fitting for the theme, in fact, Lister thought, as he surveyed the room critically. He nodded. Not bad. Not bad at all!

The Cat caught him as he was about to check on the bewildered looking Rimmer, who was seated in a corner, staring at a bottle of what might charitably be classified as a beverage, as though it had just made a lewd remark about his mother. "Hey, listen man, I just wanted to say that I did all of this," he indicated the festive decorations, "to practice my scissor technique. I mean," he leaned in nervously, casting a furtive glance in Rimmer's direction, "I don't want you to get the wrong I idea here. I _do_ hate the smeghead."

Lister grinned, and handed the feline a bottle of the same murky yellow stuff Rimmer was avoiding having to actually drink. "It's all right, you know. Yer allowed to like him; I'm not gonna kick ya out of the airlock or anything. You don't have to make this big production about it. It's OK." Unscrewing the cork of his own bottle, thankful that his sense of smell was nearly gone from years of smoking, Lister downed a considerable mouthful of whatever-it-was (he found that it was generally best not to ask), and winced.

The Cat fondled his bottle, wisely deciding not to sniff it. "No, bud, that's not what I mean." He held the offered drink an arms-length away, as though still undecided about how to dispose of it. Drinking, his posture indicated, would probably be a last resort. "I really _do_ hate him, and I _really_ wanted you to know that."

Shaking his head with a snort, Lister headed on over to the distressed looking hologram. "How's the celebrating going?" he grinned, taking another shudder-inducing gulp of thank-god-it-was-at-least-alcoholic liquid.

Still eying his own drink, Rimmer carefully set it down on the table, as though afraid it might attack. "I don't get it," he muttered, yet again.

"So ya keep saying. Don't see what there is to get though." Lister sucked up the last of the foul stuff up through the slimline neck, and found that the edges of his mouth were drawn into a smile as he noticed Rimmer looking at him nervously.

"It wasn't like this on Io. Back there people had _standards_. You couldn't just walk into a room and tell people you were gay, and not have there be consequences." he picked the bottle up again, and twirled it in his hands angrily. " _Serious_ consequences. They certainly wouldn't throw you a smegging party!"

"Doesn't surprise me." Lister nodded quickly in Kryten's direction, and at once the mechanoid hobbled over hurriedly with another drink. Lister accepted it with a stomach-churning mixture of dread and joy, giving Rimmer a toast, and closing his eyes as he downed a fair few ounces of it.

Rimmer glared. "I don't see how you can drink that stuff without projectile vomiting it straight back up again," he mumbled, his eyes still fixating on the point where Lister's lips had met the neck of the bottle.

Lister shrugged, and slammed the bottle down on the table, a little too hard, making Rimmer jump slightly. "It's not what we had at _my_ coming out party, I'll grant ye that," he admitted.

Rimmer's eyes seemed to lean out of their sockets as the man himself recoiled. The effect was more than a little unsettling to Lister. " _You_ had a coming out party?"

"'Course I did! Everyone did, back home." And what parties they had been, Lister remembered. Attendance was a sure-fire way to get laid, even if it wasn't actually your party.

Rimmer looked intently at the garlanded wall opposite, as though he was addressing it, and not the man sitting next to him. "Everyone? Everyone in Liverpool was gay?" His frown deepened, and would have threatened to dislodge the 'H' there, had it not been for the fact that it was much a part of his head as his now quivering nostrils. "What about all the football fans?"

Lister shook his head. "You've not seen a lot of football, have ya, Rimmer?" The way those players hugged and groped and jumped one another after a game? You'd have to be blind and daft to miss the undercurrent there. "And no, not everyone was gay. You get a coming out party once ya realize what you are, you know, sexually."  
Rimmer turned his head, very slowly, his murky-green eyes examining Lister with disbelief. "And you had two of them?" A note of fake bravado escaped him, but it wasn't really trying. "What, changed your mind, did you? Got tired of shagging one, so you went after the other?"

"Nah, I just like parties. Said I was gay for the first one and straight for the next, but who cares, yeah? I'm not into labels and that anyway." He finished the second bottle with only a mild shudder, quite pleased with himself. The stuff grew on you, apparently.

There was a slight pause as Rimmer's forehead rearranged itself as if to accommodate strange new ideas. His eyebrows jumped up and down, dancing to the beat of his vibrating nostrils. "So you've... What you're saying is you've... with _both_? And not... That is to say..."

Lister giggled through the first swig at his newly acquired bottle. "That eats ya up, don't it? What, the idea of me shaggin' a bloke too" he wiggled his head back and forth, leaning forwards in the chair and almost loosing his balance, " _weird_ for ya? Too _out there_? Rimmer, wake up and smell the..." He frowned, "something or other century! No one cares about that stuff any more! Eh? What's eating ya now?"

Rimmer stared blankly ahead. No, this was not how it was supposed to go. He had just admitted to something unnatural and sick, which was _supposed_ to make his teammates even more disgusted with him than they already were. There was _supposed_ to be anger and accusations, perhaps even some hysterics. And Lister, Lister was supposed to be so revolted by his revelations that he would never allow Rimmer to come anywhere near him, certainly not as close as they were now, chatting all too smegging amicably, looking so at goited _peace_ with everything that Rimmer just wanted to _scream_! There had to be something he could to that would repel even Lister; that would make even the king of slob recoil in utter shock and disgust. He cast his mind about desperately, as Lister droned on and on about how swutting natural this all was, and how he'd never kissed a bloke or anything, really, and suddenly, Rimmer had it. As fast as he could, he swiveled round and grabbed Lister under his arms, drawing him close so quickly that he knocked the other man's breath out, and before either of them could react or regret anything, had his tongue so far down Lister's throat it was a miracle the scouser didn't throw up on the spot.

"Well now," Lister choked out as they finally broke apart, "can't say I didn't expect that."

Rimmer froze. "You mean... you're not..." Carefully constructed rigid walls and pathways in his mind had turned out, quite unexpectedly, to be made of ice. And Lister, his face shining; Lister was the sun. "But I can't-" Rimmer began, helplessly. Words were melting away too.

"Hey," Lister grinned, sneaking an arm around Rimmer's waist, "It's your party – you can snog who you want to."

And to his horror, Rimmer realized he was right.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> If you've enjoyed this story, and you like Red Dwarf slash, check out the [Red Dwarf Slash Community on Livejournal](http://community.livejournal.com/fanfic100/profile), home of excellent slash writers!


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